


Listen when people are talking to you

by mellyface



Category: Ensemble Stars! (Video Game)
Genre: I live for exasperated flustered Tsukasa who still uses keigo, M/M, This is really innocent, Writing on the Body, but otherwise not really BL, dont get me wrong tho it's still really gay, rated T for confusing teen hormones and a lot of skinship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-10
Updated: 2016-06-10
Packaged: 2018-07-14 04:42:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,591
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7153997
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mellyface/pseuds/mellyface
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Leo has a "vision" Tsukasa's been abducted by aliens and therefore obviously has to check his body for signs of tampering. Obviously.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Listen when people are talking to you

**Author's Note:**

> Hi I can't believe I wrote something not nasty
> 
> I am new to enstars and if I got them totally wrong I'm sorry lmao I just fell in love with this pairing somehow. Everyone in enstars is so cute and eccentric and not idol-like at all and I am so endeared. Please enjoy this silly little fic.
> 
> (Also I wrote this entirely on my phone during down time at work over the last few days so sorry if the formatting's weird/if it makes no sense lmao)

“Wait a m—hol—!”

Tsukasa twists like a slippery fish in Leo’s noncommittal yet unrelenting hold.  
Leo ignores his protests in favor of humming _hoohh_?s and _hmmm_ ’s as his fingers slide further up into his shirt and fan out freely over the naked skin of his back.

“That tickles—!” Tsukasa manages to squeak out amongst various noises of struggle, still somehow managing to use polite Japanese despite all the funny feelings squirming beneath his skin that are definitely more than just ticklishness.

“Hold still, will you? I'm just worried about my cute newbie~!”

Tsukasa thinks there's way too much amusement in his voice for someone who claims merely to be concerned for his well-being. 

Not that there’s even anything Leo should be worried about beyond maybe the question of his own sanity. At this rate though, if he keeps touching him like this, they may wind up both with a _real_ problem on their hands, Tsukasa thinks. As if to prove a point, Leo’s breath skirts just below his navel, making his whole body jerk involuntarily.  
His eyes screw shut and he tries to remember—as he often finds he has to ask himself when it comes to Leo—how he'd even wound up in this situation in the first place.

 

He had come early to scrub the remnants of yesterday's ink from the practice room walls (after yet another of Leo’s many sudden bursts of “cosmic” inspiration that apparently could not wait until a proper pen and paper had been fetched for him—never mind how hard Tsukasa and even Anzu tried and tried again to keep such things on hand to avoid blatant vandalism of school property in these very instances), when Leo himself had come barreling through the door unannounced, with enough force to topple the nearest several desks. Tsukasa had bolted like a frightened cat, turning to the door with wide eyes and heart twanging painfully out of sync like the strings of a smashed guitar. He gawked for a good ten seconds while Leo paused to catch his breath, realizing once his heart rate slowed again that he’d been rude not to address his senior.

“Ah...Leader.”

It was about as much as he could manage considering Leo's always been difficult to talk to even when he isn't giving him heart attacks.

“Is something the matter?” He adds, since ‘hello’ doesn't seem quite right.

“You. Newbie,” Leo just huffs, jabbing a finger in his direction and stomping towards him.

Tsukasa frowns.

“As I have said before, please call me by _name_ , Suou—”

He doesn't get to finish (not that there’s much point considering how many times he's said it already) because Leo’s hands are suddenly on the waistband of his pants and deftly pulling his shirt untucked. Tsukasa's suddenly forgotten his own name, too.

“Wh—!?”

“I'm just checking something.” Leo breezes, as if that should be enough to assuage any normal person in this situation.

 _This is sexual harassment_ Tsukasa thinks, means to _say_ as Leo’s fingers duck under the rumpled up hem of his shirt and press to the hollow of his soft, bare stomach. _Definitely_ _sexual harassment_.  
But somehow all he can stammer out is:

“—Tsukasa...my name is _Suou Tsukasa_ …!”

“Right, right,” Leo hums and nods without actually bothering to acknowledge or repeat the name. He doesn't even look up, bent over in concentration, just slides the fabric slowly upward with the utmost scrutiny, and though Tsukasa feels utterly _harassed_ , it's really more like a doctor giving an exam than probing with any sort of sexual intent.

That's not the issue here, Tsukasa has to remind himself.

“ _Leader_! I think I'm entitled to know what you are doing!”

At last Leo looks up to see that Tsukasa’s face is flushed bright pink and pointed down at him—and that’s kind of fun.

“I saw in a dream—a moment of divine inspiration—that a UFO abducted you! Sooo naturally I have to check to see if you've been tampered with.”

Tsukasa can't believe what he's hearing, or maybe he can, considering who it's coming from.

“I can absolutely assure you I have _not_ been abducted by aliens.”

“Of course you wouldn't know if you were, Newbie. They're very thorough like that.”

Leo's nonchalance is grating but not half so distracting as the hands squeezing at the skin of his ribs. They prod and pinch and pull it even tighter over his skinny frame, as if Leo’s expecting (more like _hoping_ ) to find some anomaly jutting through the skin beyond just his bones.

“This is _nonsense_!”

Tsukasa tugs vehemently downward at the hem of his shirt because doing so feels less rude than prying Leo’s hands off him directly, and he hopes that the use of his English vocabulary will help to convey his unwillingness.

It doesn’t.

“Ah! Maybe here?!”

Leo, struck once more by whimsy, drops to his knees and wraps his arms without warning around Tsukasa’s small waist. He leans in and presses his cheek to the warmth of a flat belly.

 

This is how Tsukasa more or less finds himself in his current predicament: Leo’s face on his bare stomach, pressed to the wall with two arms wrapped around him, caging him in, curious palms opening like flowers to the sun against the curve of his back.

 

Despite Leo’s orders to hold still, Tsukasa’s having a hard time holding back the involuntary jitters and twitches that come as Leo commits each new inch of skin to memory through the careful recording of his busy fingers. But for now at least he gives up on trying to squirm free; if he struggles any harder he’ll wind up resorting to violence, which is not befitting behavior of a Suou towards anyone, let alone an upperclassman.

He lets out a sigh of resignation.

“What, may I ask, are you even looking for?”

“Ah. Here!”

Tsukasa jolts again as Leo’s fingers dip between the ridges of his spine. The back of his head smacks into the wall and he cradles it with a pained hiss. He honestly should know better by now than to ask his deviant Leader a question and expect an actual answer. He should honestly know better than to expect anything from Leo at all aside from a headache.

Leo takes one hand off Tsukasa’s back to wind it round front and rest at his stomach again, dangerously low, fingers splayed just south of where his cheek rests flush against his abdomen. The way he presses his palms in on either side as if to sandwich Tsukasa’s thin frame between two opposing hands sends a funny, warm tingling to each nerve ending throughout his body.

“It’s growing inside you.” Leo starts laughing to himself and the vibrations tickle on Tsukasa’s skin, “I’ve made an amazing discovery!”

Tsukasa wills a silent scream to die in the back of his throat.

“There….there is nothing growing in me!!”

“Can’t you feel it? You've got all these little bumps! Here, let's count, 1...2...3!”

Leo’s fingers slide down each individual vertebra in his spine one at a time.

“That's just my spine…ah—!”

Tsukasa hunches over Leo’s head when his fingertips brush one particularly ticklish spot at the small of his back. Leo pulls back at the proximity, as if Tsukasa leaning over him is more an infringement on his personal space than anything he's been doing to him. It backfires anyway, considering Tsukasa has to brace his hands firm on Leo’s shoulders just to keep from toppling forward. He rights himself and frowns, red in the cheeks and maybe breathing a little harder than normal.

“Please stop that.”

“I want a better look, turn around.”

“No thank you!”

Leo does not attend, merely grabs Tsukasa again by the waist of his pants, hooking his fingers under the belt loops for leverage and twisting him around 180 degrees. Tsukasa barely gets his hands out in time to keep from smacking his nose into the wall, Leo’s half scrubbed out marks from the night before mocking him right in his face. He turns his head over his shoulder to protest but Leo’s palms are flat on his back again, forcing him in place, cheek smushed flat to the wall.

“—please listen when people are talking to you!”

“Wow!” Leo presses an ear to Tsukasa’s back, “I can hear it!”

“ _Like I said_ , there is no alien _thing_ growing inside me. Leader, please stop this nonsense.”

Tsukasa is almost worried, for a brief moment of insanity, that there really is something wrong with him—that is, some kind of alien interference—if only because Leo is so insistent on a daily basis about the existence aliens and UFOs and the cosmos and outer space and the like. But obviously that can't be true right?! He mentally berates himself for getting caught up in his deviant Leader’s pace, he can hardly call himself worthy of his family name by having such thoughts.

“It's a song.”

“Pardon?”

“It's a _song_!! It's not a thing it's a song.” Leo seems more to be voicing his own discovery aloud to himself than offering Tsukasa an explanation, “The cosmos have possessed this body and hidden a song within it, and I’m the only one who can find it! It's a test of my abilities, they're trying to communicate with me! Wahahahha~!”

Tsukasa honestly doesn't know where to even begin with any of that but it's not as though he has much chance to say anything anyway, what with Leo’s continuous manhandling.

“Hmm, it starts here.” He rolls up Tsukasa’s shirt to his armpits and begins tracing a line from one shoulder blade to the other. Tsukasa shivers at the cool air on his newly exposed skin and decides to just resign himself to Leo’s mad ravings.

For one, he's getting tired of being ignored, but there's also the voice in the back of his head that admits if this is really another stroke of inspiration then he can't exactly interfere, for the sake of Knights if nothing else. But also if he's being honest it's because he loves Leo’s songs. Leo is one troublesome entity but his songs are another thing entirely, it's not like he has to like both...

“Aha! I've got it!” Leo has what has probably been his fifth epiphany since breakfast this morning, “I really am loved by the stars, I'm a genius after all!”

He breaks into another fit of cackling and withdraws a marker from his pocket. Tsukasa hears him uncap it _—_ with what is probably his teeth seeing as he's still got one hand firmly planted on his hip. He feels his shirt yanked even higher and the cool, wet tip of a felt marker at the base of his neck.  
_Wait a minute_ …!

“Ho _—_ ”

“Don't move! Don't speak.”

Leo sounds so uncharacteristically serious for a moment that Tsukasa can't help but obey. Leo narrows his eyes and nods, not that Tsukasa can see, but there is clearly a light behind them. His voice goes quiet.

“This could be the best song I've ever written.”

It's almost believable, even if he says this sort of thing every time, said this same thing during yesterday's practice when he’d frenziedly etched his latest score onto the very wall Tsukasa's now found himself pinned to. He doesn't want to admit that for all that he can't understand Leo and finds him impossible to deal with, he can't help getting swept into his pace each and every time inspiration hits. His opinion of Leo is arguably the lowest out of all the other members of Knights, or at the very least they're all better at tolerating their fool of a King than he is, but at times like these he always winds up being the one most enthralled. Maybe because it's all still new to him, seeing a genius composer up close at work.

For this reason Tsukasa falls silent and tries his best not to squirm at the tickling of the pen flicking gentle scratches onto his back, tries not to think about how hard he's going to have to scrub his back (or rather have someone else scrub it for him because he can't reach—oh _god_ ) to get all this off, or just how all-over bizarre and weirdly intimate this whole situation is. Never mind that the door is wide open and if any of their fellow unit members come waltzing in right now he will probably never live it down for the rest of his life.

But mostly he tries not to think about how it feels kind of good, like in an objective it's-nice-to-have-his-back-scratched kind of way, but also in a makes-him-feel-kind-of-special way, having Leo's eyes and hands so intent on him and his stupid mouth falls completely silent. Tsukasa’s always thought that Leo’s...almost _cool_ when he composes, that is, when he's quiet and focused and not saying anything perverse or strange for a change, and he finds himself thinking it's actually kind of a shame that he can't see his face right now.  
He quickly shakes his head as if to dispel the thought.

“There's pen and paper on the table, you know.” he says even though it's obviously too late for that, because it's what he always says.

Or at least it had been on the table before Leo barged in and overturned the place, he mentally corrects himself, glancing over to the heap of scattered blank score sheets on the floor out the corner of his eye.

Leo’s not listening, of course; Tsukasa knows he's already off in some far-away place now, his hand moving faster than Tsukasa can try to guess which notes he's writing.

There are a couple times when Tsukasa can't keep down a soft hum or gasp when it tickles too much, and he's not sure if it's comforting or mortifying that Leo seems to reply unconsciously(?) each time with a little hum of his own. It’s like some kind of private exchange between two songbirds—only if that's the case, Tsukasa has no idea what they're saying.

It’s not until Leo’s scribbled fully down his back that Tsukasa has the audacity to interrupt, if only because Leo’s hand is literally on his butt, keeping his canvas in place with clearly no concern for wherever his hold happens to land.

“ _Lead_ —!”

“Other side.” Leo says more to himself than to Tsukasa. Tsukasa knows, with a twitch of his lip and the irritated furrowing of his brows, that he's no more right now than an instrument to Leo’s burning creativity. For all that Tsukasa has begun to suspect Leo really does know his name and continually just chooses not to use it, at the present moment Suou Tsukasa does not exist in the current Leo’s infinite yet singular universe—no one does, except Leo and the stars.

Maybe it's this understanding that lets him be flipped onto his back like a rag doll, arms falling limply at his sides as Leo starts pouring a rain of scribbles all over again down his front. It's a million times more embarrassing this way, not to mention more ticklish among, well, _other_ things, too, but at least now he has the distraction of watching Leo’s expression, watching Leo’s world spill forth from the marker’s fine tip and onto his skin in hurried yet careful strokes. He tries to keep distracted by reading the music in his head but it's hard to follow along when it’s both upside down and at an angle, not to mention his ability to concentrate is a bit shot at the moment.

Tsukasa closes his eyes and waits for it to be over once Leo’s pen reaches his navel, swirls around it and over the more sensitive areas just below. Finally (thankfully) the pen stops moving, and before Tsukasa’s deemed it safe to blink open one cautionary eye, Leo is sighing and slumping forward like he's just used up everything he had. His hands sag and catch loosely in Tsukasa's belt loops and his forehead lands with a soft pat right against his crotch. Tsukasa nearly short circuits.

“Leader,” he warns, feeling his temperature rising. _Please get your face out of my groin!_ he wants to say but can't even bring such a phrase to the tip of his tongue. Leo sinks forward and his cheek rubs up against some place really dangerous. Tsukasa repeats himself like a frantic, malfunctioning robot.

“Leader, leader, leader, _leader, leaderleaderleaderleader—-_!!”

“Sooo noisy!” Leo says and flops his head back finally, to Tsukasa's relief. He looks hung over. His eyes regain some spark though when he sees Tsukasa, who’s momentarily forgotten his body is covered in his Leader’s newest masterpiece.

“Wow, I did it... As expected of a genius like me!”

He immediately stands to admire his work, largely ignoring Tsukasa’s protesting and flapping about as he does so. Finally the shrill of his junior’s still impossibly polite Japanese reaches his ears though only after his voice practically breaks from shouting.

“ _I said_ —will you please! listen! to people when they are talking to you!!”

“What do you want? I'm right here, there’s no need to shout, wahahaha!”

Tsukasa looks like he wants to cry from sheer frustration, maybe a bit due to shame as well.

“I would like to cleanse myself of this mess as soon as possible, so can you please transcribe your ‘celestial’ musings elsewhere, maybe to something more practical such as _paper_?”

“I'm too tired, sounds like a pain.” Leo stretches his arms over his head with a yawn and leans against the nearest table to better admire his work. Tsukasa's mouth falls open in obvious protest but Leo just reaches into his pocket and offers up his phone, “Can I take a picture?”

It's maybe the first time Leo has bothered asking his permission for anything, and Tsukasa, dumbfounded by this, just finds himself nodding in spite of himself.

“Okay, let’s do your back first, ‘cause that's where it starts. Turn around.”

Tsukasa does so—is grateful for the opportunity to face away from the camera as the realization that Leo is pointing it at his mostly naked upper body begins to set in. Leo reaches for his shirt.

“And let's get this out of the way—mmkay~!”

“I can do this much myself!” Tsukasa interjects, yanking his shirt out of Leo's hands and pulling it the rest of the way over his head. He ignores the way Leo sighs and taps his foot obnoxiously when he takes his time to fold it and set it on the table. Let him be buried in his shame and just die, he thinks, should his family ever find out about any of this.

Each click of the phone camera’s shutter behind him makes his ears burn just a little bit more than the last.

“How many do you intend to take??” He turns around with a petulant glare only to hear one more shutter sound go off, “please delete that one.”

“Okay, okay,” Leo flaps his hand at him, “’Kay turn around, face me.”

Having the camera in front of him is predictably a thousand times worse. It's hard to find a safe direction to look in, straight ahead at Leo being obviously out of the question, but eventually he settles on the vase of lilies atop the piano in the back corner. Three more clicks and it's finally over, but before Leo can let Tsukasa go free he first taps into his photo library to look through the pictures and make sure they've turned out okay. His eyes widen just a little and lets out a soft hum of curiosity.

“Ohh? Your shoulders are really red in this photo, Newbie.”

Tsukasa freezes. For just a brief second he wants to grab Leo's phone and chuck it out the nearest window even though actually doing such a thing would horrify him most out of everyone.

“Here, too—whoa, and your face in this one. You're seriously pink!”

Leo's burst of laughter is short lived when he looks up and sees the whole of Tsukasa flushed even pinker than in the photos.

“Please stop…” His voice is small and he’s staring hard at Leo's feet, looking like he wants to disappear.

Leo steps forward to get a closer look at him. He comes close and tilts his head, considering.

“Hey...aren't you actually kind of—”

“—Kasa! Have you seen that stupid—”

Izumi appears in the doorway but falls silent as soon as he sees the two of them. From the look on his face it’s taken him no time at all to more or less assess what's happened, at least as far as the miserable look on Tsukasa’s face and the pen markings all over his body.

“....King.” He finishes quietly.

The look on his face when he regards Tsukasa is far closer to pity than ridicule, and coming from Sena that's not comforting at all.

“Yo, Sena! You're just in time for my latest masterpiece, heh!”  
Leo waves, phone in hand.

Tsukasa has the vague, steadily growing feeling of wanting to crumble into nothingness; the only thing grounding him there is Sena’s understanding and the horrible, traitorous undeniable desire he has to hear Leo’s new song, in spite of all that he’s gone through because of it.

This perverted Leader of theirs had better be right, he thinks, pulling himself together as best he can, this had better be the best song he's ever written.

 


End file.
